I chose the purple ropes for him. I remembered all the
times that winding rope around a stranger had taken me to connection, an “Ohhey
it’s you!” of recognition.
And it was beautiful! And silly! I have a four-month-old
kitten, how was she supposed to resist playing with the bottoms of the ropes
while I wound them around and around Heart Emoji Guy?! I really should train
her not to do this, but I was laughing too hard to make her stop. I considered
how much nicer an evening this could be if I could just end this performance and
switch gears to cat-kindness and solitude. Am I destined to be alone with the
cats forever? On my more confident days, that actually doesn’t seem so bad!
I reached around Heart Emoji Guy to cross the ropes at
his back—usually a reliable segue to a kiss. I felt his sweet eyelashes against
my cheek as he avoided my mouth again.
I was sure he didn’t want to kiss me. I had to honor
that despite the loss bubbling up from my hearts like the patrol balloon thing
from The Prisoner—evil, ominous, strangely effective.
I was sitting on the bed behind him adjusting the ropes
at his lovely waist when I finally admitted it: “I’m so sorry, this just doesn’t
feel right.” He was very understanding, I thought. He stayed smiling all
through the process of getting dressed, finding his phone, getting his sneakers
on; polite, kind, deferential.
After he closed the door, I felt lonely but relieved to
be with the sad—the wistfulness of still missing Blue Ribbon Work Crush, the
loss of this new hopeful-seeming connection. The idea of sex without kissing
hurt so badly and clouded my heart and mind with teenage trauma and loss. A
thunderstorm of shame was coming, whether I deserved it or not.
The other day at the pool. I saw a kid with purple
hair and felt joyful that her hair color was playful, accepted, probably not
fraught in any way.
I remembered my own teenage purple hair, right after The
Bad Thing happened. I somehow found it comforting that it matched the deep bruises
under my eyes. It was a way to define myself, to take control of my own body in
the wake of losing all control. In the wake of almost losing myself. Or, in some
ways, losing myself entirely. My purple hair was a haphazardly done piece of
art, giving the finger to heartlessness, abuse, and rage.
My mom saw the purple hair as another thing people
would judge her for, another way that I had gone completely out of her control.
She kneeled me down at the tub with Chlorox bleach, made me bleach and rinse
and bleach and rinse over and over until she finally let me stop. My hair wasn’t
brown again, it was a sickly lichen green. The color of queasiness itself.
Still, to her it was closer to “normal” color, so no one would know. She didn’t
want anyone to know what she had allowed to happen to my body, which she definitely
considered hers.
All this is to say, the STI diagnoses I got when I was
16 or 17, a bouquet of them from encounters both welcome and horrific, came at
a time when I didn’t really know how to process what they meant. I wasn’t
present-day me with all these years of sex-geekery under my belt. I was raised
Catholic and everything I knew about sex was bad, except most of my own
experiences.
So my teenage self took in the STIs as more evidence
that I was bad, that I was rotten all the way through and this was my own evilness
just starting to show itself. There were no cheerful infographics Planned
Parenthood’s Instagram page—that was a million years away. There were Sex Geeks
in the late eighties/early nineties, I’m sure, but I definitely hadn’t met any
of them.
Now, with my extremely low-stakes HSV-1 diagnosis, I
have every resource and every support. I know that herpes is incredibly
common and that the stigma around it is ignorant and cruel. But the shame is still
in there deep. It’s my shame and I’m gonna have to be the one taking care of it
for now, at least until the universe sends me my next fairy-tale kiss.
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